The Power of Twitter, For Better or Worse

This afternoon around 3:30pm EST, US Airways Flight 1529 from NYC to Charlotte made an emergency landing in the Hudson River after the plane hit a flock of birds. Thankfully, everyone is safe.

But that’s not the story I’d like to cover. (For like @strekopoints out, we’re all tweeting reporters.)

I saw, just seconds after the crash landing, my TweetDeck light up with plane crash tweets faster than I could possibly read. One of the links posted was to MSNBC streaming their live broadcast which, as I watched, showed a photo (which ended up being a twitpic) and the photographer and now famous Tweeter being interviewed (@jkrums).

Even though bad news typically spreads faster than good, the implication is huge for driving traffic to your website. For the question “What are you doing?” often turns into “What are you reading?” While Twitter links pass no link juice, you can see from this instance alone, that posting links for the buzz alone is well worth the effort.